


The Last Man Standing

by lilyconrad



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Clone Trooper Culture, Clone Wars, Gen, a little ghost story for Halloween, a little gruesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 01:28:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12570644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyconrad/pseuds/lilyconrad
Summary: A ghost story the clone troopers might pass around late at night in the dark.





	The Last Man Standing

**Author's Note:**

> A shout-out to Plodder's deliciously spooky fic [The Doomed Lovers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12516224/chapters/28498088) for inspiring me to do my own ghost-story Star Wars piece in honor of Halloween. 
> 
> I went in the direction of my childhood-traumatizing yet favorite book _Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark_. Hope you enjoy!

Late one night aboard a command ship drifting out in the void between stars on it way to its next campaign, an infantry-rank clone brother was on his way to deliver a data pad to a meeting. No one was around as he passed through the silent, bone-white halls, only the sound of his boots on the metal flooring.

The grunt was almost there, with one more passage to turn down, when he heard another clone whisper to him from the opposite direction. “Hey.”

The grunt looked back and saw a helmeted brother standing far off down one hallway, far enough his voice shouldn’t have sounded so close. The clone raised a gloved hand and gestured for the grunt to come toward him. But he had no rank on him at all. No insignia. No colors.

His armor wasn’t dented or scratched in the way it would be if an intruder had removed markings from a normal set of armor. The plates gleamed as smoothly and blankly as if they had just come from a Kamino factory.

The grunt took a hesitant few steps toward him. “Identify yourself.”

The stranger turned and walked off.

“Hey!” the clone shouted, chasing after him, and just as he reached the far end of the hall an explosion sent him flying in a shuddering wave of heat. The Separatists had planted a bomb in the meeting.

Of everyone scheduled to be there, the grunt was the only survivor.

The last man standing.

The grunt saw the strange brother a few months after that in the field. He was asleep in his bedroll out on a reconnaissance mission with his squad when something made him wake up.

The unsettling, skull-like helmet was there, right over him. “Come on,” the apparition whispered. Frightened, the grunt didn’t hesitate between the choice of waking his squadmates first and just getting out of there as fast as he could. He jogged off into the brush alongside the brother that made no sound as the ghost wove between the plants and disappeared into the evening mist.

An airstrike killed the rest of the squad a few moments later in a whining pitch of artillery, and in the inferno all the grunt could do was give an insane, grateful laugh.

He was, once again, the last man standing.

He hadn’t warned anyone, but he told himself there hadn’t been time. He had made it out, and wasn’t that what was important?

When the strange, featureless armored ghost appeared a third time, almost a year later as the clone was patrolling a quiet, empty path through the forest surrounding his new squad’s camp, the clone was ready.

“Thank you, brother,” he called out as the silent apparition gestured him forward. “Thank you for always saving me.” He jogged toward him on the narrow trail, wondering what awful fate he was escaping this time and for a moment pitying the men back in camp behind him. But he kept going, eager to be safe.

“Do you want to be the last man standing?” the ghost rasped from beneath his bucket as he reached up to take it off.

“Yeah, come on, let’s go!” the grunt hissed, but then slid to a stop, horrified at the grotesque sight before him.

There was nothing that could still be called a man under the helmet, nothing that should be able to make sound. The awful, bloody wreck looked like it had lived through a dozen airstrikes and front line assaults and was still, somehow, regarding him with bloodshot eyes and its ruined mouth twisted into a horrible grin.

“I wanted to be the last man standing too,” the thing said. “I was a coward, and I ran. Left my brothers to die.”

The grunt was frozen in horror, unable to move, as the gruesome apparition came closer.

“They made me wear their wounds, wear the way they died. And it hurts. So much. It always hurts. The only way out was to find someone. Someone like me. And I did,” it gurgled, reaching out toward him with ghoulish delight.

“Now it’s your turn.”

The rest of the camp that night heard inhuman screams and came running, but the grunt was never found.

Some say that he still appears at lonely outposts and in empty corridors, wearing that strange armor, beckoning brothers away.

Don’t go with him.


End file.
